Triumph (16 page)

Kit had been reared to think of himself in dramatic and romantic terms, being an only son of unwise and indulgent parents. The fact that his self-appraisals were such somewhat hid from him the deeper fact that they were unconscious, fundamentally very selfish, very self-centered, and, under any great stress, at best, immature.

To Faith, in this moment, foreseen since their entombment, postponed with a rising anxiety, Kit's simper was asinine.

"Don't make speeches," she said. "And don't bother to get out the old false faces of chivalry, or whatever you think they are."

"I could be angry at that!" She nodded, her face almost without expression, her eyes averted, their arching brows knit slightly. "I know. And I don't really want to make you mad."

"Fine. Then all you need to do is move over a bit. Better still, give your thus-far-noble fiancé an appointment for a little tête-à-tête in some secret comer of this catacomb-

-preferably, your own boudoir--"

Her head was shaking. She saw him grow pale.

"Why not?" His words were two slaps.

Faith stared at him as if he were not human, but some unpleasant living thing--a spider, perhaps, come upon unexpectedly and when she'd assumed all American spiders, like all known Americans, were gone: a harmless but ugly-looking stowaway. But, slowly, her eyes crinkled, she smiled, and she reached out to ruffle his bristly hair. "Kit, you dope!" She said it affectionately. The instant of surprise and repugnance was gone; she remembered him as she'd always known him, and always felt about him: familiar, rather superficial, very handsome, spoiled, amiable Christopher Barlow, her neighbor.

"More like it," he said.

Her eyes now did meet his and their gaze was warm, tender even. But it was an evanescent look and a sigh erased its last trace. "I think I know exactly how you feel, Kit.

Or think you feel." She shrugged a little and smiled again, but owing to some inner need for smiling as a way to conceal unease. "Let's face it. I know what you want. Me, in short."

"You--in short. And always and forever. And also, right now!"

Faith nodded and that made the gleam of the floor lamp play on her hair. "I know.

Well, look, Kit. You can skip any planned peroration about our being engaged. And you can also skip any hortative discussion of my past life and its abandoned ways. I know we are engaged and I have no intention of trying to change that. But, for a whole lot of reasons, I've lost the incentive to be my old, dissolute, gay, loving self. And I strongly suspect it'll be a long, long time before I even feel female, let alone amorous female--if I ever do, again. Oh, don't get mad at
that!
I will,
sure,
someday! But right now--under these circumstances--being engaged, in love, or even caring for love, that
sort
of love, seems--"

"Not to me, it doesn't!"

"I know." Her smile became almost supplicatory. "But it takes two, remember?"

"If you'll--?" He touched her. She pulled away. His face turned red. "Look here, Faith. I--!"

"Look here, nothing! You don't own me. Yet, anyhow. And plenty of people still think--thought--that mere engagement isn't a license to practice being married. I'm feeling, say, something like them."

"Sure is out of character!"

"Not really. Not when you consider the terrible things that happened to a billion people--" she pointed upward--"around the earth. Or when you consider what it must look like, in all the many places we knew. The
silence.
The
smell,
for that matter. Don't you ever realize things . . . like that? And doesn't realizing, sort of . . . deplete your libido?"

"I don't dwell on it," he answered, reprovingly. "Or else it might start
me
into a funk. Like yours."

She ignored it. Her voice went on, softly, "And then, the utter preposterousness, of us."

"What's so damned
preposterous
about us?"

"Fourteen people," she answered, but as if answering to herself and not to his interrupting and sarcastic query. "Just fourteen people--and they are probably all those left alive for miles and miles and hundreds of miles, except, maybe, Ben says, military people, who won't last so very much longer, likely.
Us,
though. We
will
go on. Alive.

Day after day. Month after month!"

"Maybe," Kit said quietly, "I ought to slap you. Shake you. You sound half nuts.

That isn't preposterous. It's real. Nothing funny about it. I've been trying to say just that.

We are here.
Ergo,
we have to carry on as before, till the pop-out moment arrives. And believe me,
that
can't be soon enough for our Christopher! I'm
suffering
in this hole, Faith! Always had a touch of the old claustrophobia. Down here, no matter how many miles of stone rooms and halls your Dad dug, it gets you! Know what I mean? You feel, day after day--and every night, especially--the old stone hill sitting on top of you, every cubic mile and every ton of it. Sometimes till you get perspiring, shaky, want to yell!"

She heard but answered only as to half-assimilated words: "No use trying to work on my sympathies, Kit. I never heard you speak about claustrophobia before, and even if you work up one, now, it would be futile. Nobody would be especially sympathetic for anybody who developed a phobia about the very thing that saved his life. But I meant something else. If you want to see
how
crazy,
how
preposterous I feel it all is, then think how many steps could have been taken to prevent what happened! How many millions of Americans could have gotten together to take measures to avoid this. That didn't. How many Presidents had how many opportunities to save us all? Starting with--who was it?--

Truman. When only our side had the bomb! And on and on, right to Conner, with the cold war the only sane chance either side had for settling anything. And the cold war always being neglected, evaded, compromised, not fought--by us--till things got
this
crazy! If . . . no! . . .
since
the people of the United States and their leaders had no better sense than to let things happen that ended with perhaps exactly fourteen survivors in the whole nation, then that's
eminently
preposterous! It's
cuckoo!
We
ought
to be hysterical with mirth at it. We ought to chortle night and day! All the Christianity, technology, education, freedom, democracy, wealth--and whammo! Gone. With fourteen remainders!

A time to bellow and roar with glee. A time to chum with laughter. A farce, Kit--
farce.

See?"

"All I see is, you're losing your grip."

"My
point,
Kit. There never
was
any grip."

He had been standing in front of her, watching with the narrow-eyed care of an expectant psychiatrist. But she had said what she had said without much emotion and with no concurrent or subsequent hysteria. Just said it, smiled a little, and stopped.

Looked up at him, quite calmly, a little questioningly. Her mind, he decided, was going glassy. What she needed was a bit of shock. A touch of the old realism.

He applied a calculated measure:

"You leave your door unlocked tonight, and lock the one that connects with your mama, even though she'll be out cold, as per usual, dear. I'll come by about midnight.

And we'll take up this engagement as it ought to be conducted."

"Oh?" Faith said.

"Yes 'Oh!' That, or I'll speak to your father about how do we get married in a joint like this. And
get
married."

She held out her hand and opened it. The ring with the great diamond blazed on her palm. "Want it back?"

"No." He said that instantly.

She slipped the ring on again. Looked at it, at him.

He said quietly, "It's this Bernman?"

"No." She thought a moment. "It's everything."

"He's a good Joe," Kit said, rather surprisingly. "Might even be interesting from a gal's standpoint. I mean as an experiment. Well. I'm broad-minded. You know that. But you'll also remember, I expect a certain
quid pro quo,
and you're not the only alluring female in this dungeon."

"I know," she said in a gentle way, a sad-seeming way.

"So
okay,
dear." He went.

Faith sat in the large room alone, tears sliding down her cheeks. Once or twice she laughed, shortly; and once or twice she sobbed, slightly. Finally she rose and just before she went into the passageway, but after she'd repaired her careful, light makeup, she said, aloud:

"It
is
preposterous, though!
Everything here!"

CHAPTER 10

Ben Bernman emerged from the communications room and rather worriedly sought out Vance Farr, whom he found, finally, in the chamber housing an elaborate machine shop, turning out on a lathe what Ben assumed were candlesticks. Farr at once explained:

"Valerie's been beefing about the absence of footstools in the joint. She always likes her feet up, when she reads, and so on. Making legs for one. We'll make most of the furniture we'll need. Help pass time."

"I didn't know," Ben smiled, "you were a master carpenter."

"No master. But I always enjoyed it--lathe work, especially. Never had time to do much." He now perceived the tension in the other man. "Hey! Something wrong?"

"It's just this, Vance. I thought you ought to help make a decision. As you know, for several evenings George and I have tuned in bits and pieces of TV programs, broadcast from below the equator and dispersed world-wide, on the international repeaters."

"A plain wonder," Farr muttered, "they weren't blown out of their orbits! Or to smithereens! Like everything else."

Ben smiled fleetingly. "They're still in orbit. Well. We now know that we can get a good picture and clear sound from various stations. And tonight, beginning at eight, there's going to be a program of film and photos and other material, showing the devastation in the United States."

"Who's transmitting that?"

"San José, Costa Rica."

"That's
above
the equator!"

"Sure. A few degrees. But they're all right. City's surrounded with mountains that shielded them from most of the fallout that reached that far south. Not very hot stuff.

They also took precautions--and still are taking 'em. But, the thing is, do you feel we should tune in whatever they project, for everybody?"

"Yeah."

Ben said, "Okay. But it could be pretty hideous."

"Bet it will be! Let's get a set hooked up--if you can do it--in the big Hall. Eight o'clock, our time? Right! Then I'll have the dinner shift feed us at seven sharp, and no alibis for delays. We maybe need to see some of the reasons for being glad we are here."

After that meal the two youngsters were told they would have to stay in their rooms--together, if they liked--as a "film for grownups only" was going to be shown in the Hall. Obediently, they accepted those orders.

Dot and Dick were biddable, and besides, they had not yet completely recovered from the numbing knowledge of their abandonment as their crumbling air-raid shelter was deserted by their own mother, or from the dreads that came afterward, even though all such alarms were kept as unfearful as the people who'd saved them or had been saved with them could manage. These shocks had made slow-healing wounds in ten- and twelve-year old children. As a result they were still abnormally docile.

The adults arranged themselves, just before eight o'clock, in two rows of chairs facing, at some distance, the white, curved surface of a TV set, a surface the size of screens made for the exhibition of home movies.

George and Ben manipulated the dials of this most modem TV set, and soon a color picture appeared-the head and shoulders of a handsome, somber man, who was talking rapidly. Headphones on a trailing wire were given to the group's linguist, Connie Davey, who had a place in the center of the front row. There was no need of turning on the loudspeaker, inasmuch as the beautiful colored girl alone knew much Spanish.

She immediately began to translate what was being said by the Costa Rican announcer: "You are about to be shown what this station has been able to gather together of photographic and taped records of the American holocaust. The first sequence you will see was taken by an American photo"--Connie hesitated--"photo-reconnaissance plane.

This plane was dispatched from Homestead Air Base, in Florida, United States, on the mission of photographing effects of the United States attack on the Soviet Union. When some way out over the Atlantic, one of the plane's six jet engines failed, and then another lost power.

"The commander was therefore forced to turn back. Information had reached him by radio that his home base in Florida was nonexistent, and also many other air bases in the United States. Hence he flew his plane to the middle American coast, which he reached north of Charleston, South Carolina. The plane arrived at that point some three hours after the start of the first Soviet strike. By then the plane's flight engineer had restored power in one of the two crippled engines.

"The men in the plane were shielded against radiation because its mission was expected to involve flights through enormously-contaminated enemy air. The film and cameras were specially designed and protected to operate safely and to prevent film from damage by radiation, up to tremendous intensities. The crew had been trained to regard their planned mission as militarily essential even if their own radiation dosage passed the lethal level and insured their ultimate deaths.

Now, on the TV set, came a still photograph of eight young men in the uniforms of the Air Force of the United States. They looked familiar, and yet, somehow, a little less vital and less military in bearing than most such crews.

The announcer apparently began talking over the "still" picture, for Connie went on:

"These are the eight officers and enlisted men on board that plane. After reaching the eastern coast of the United States they headed north, hoping to locate some field, military or civilian, where they could land. They had fuel for many more hours of swift flight. It did not at once occur to them that, since their mission had been--" Connie again seemed to have missed the Spanish word, then found it--"aborted, they might usefully employ their special aircraft and its equipment to make a record of enemy damage to their homeland. That opportunity was realized only as they approached Norfolk, Virginia.